I was listening to The Avalanches' Since I Left You last night, and was struck by just how far all-sample music has deviated stylistically from them in 2000 to, say, The Hood Internet, Super Mash Bros., or even Girl Talk now. Obviously, current mashup artists don't have much to do with the first fully sample-based album, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing....., but then again they probably shouldn't. Endtroducing..... isn't a dance album; apart from "The Number Song" and "Organ Donor", it's all brooding atmospherics, so it should bear little relation to mashups meant for dancefloors. But Since I Left You, while ending up as so much more, is meant first and foremost as party music. Yet the way it approaches song structure is far more traditional than current mashups. Check out the title track (whose video, incidentally, is probably my favorite for any song):
Compare that to Super Mash Bros.' "Meet Me at Fantasy Island":
The Avalanches' style isn't exactly verse-chorus-verse, especially not on more four-to-the-floor stuff like "A Different Feeling", but there is definitely a structure; there's even, arguably, a bridge in "Since I Left You". Super Mash Bros., of course, just take their favorite parts from the songs being sampled and throw them together.
That works to a certain extent, and when a mashup artist is really good at selecting killer snippets, the results can be devastating. This is why Feed the Animals hit so hard when it came out -- Girl Talk knew exactly what to pull out and exactly where to place it. But there's a reason I listen to Since I Left You straight through more than I do Feed the Animals. Layering one catchy bit after another forces you to keep up, which takes the fun out of successive listens. Listening to Girl Talk, after a while, is exhausting; you get hit by one hook after another without being able to breath. The Avalanches welcome you to paradise, but they also let you relax once you get there.